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Sunday, 7 May 2017

I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be a guest at a
synagogue service when we read a text similar to the one we read this weekend.
The Book of Leviticus is full of such texts – about High Priests and
purification rituals and sacrifices of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of
blood on altars.

We ‘insiders’ just take these texts for granted. We
think: this is where we have reached in our annual cycle of reading. We don’t
have a choice. These are our sacred
texts, they have been read or chanted word for word, unchanged, week by week,
for two millennia. They are central to what’s held the Jewish people together
for all this time.

But if you are an outsider - if you aren’t Jewish, or if
you are Jewish but an infrequent visitor to services - you come to the
synagogue and hear about all these arcane and sometimes frankly repellent
cultic practices that Jews don’t do anymore and haven’t done for 2000 years,
because we don’t have a Temple any more (thank God, one might say). We’ve moved
on into a completely different way of expressing our religious and spiritual
identity. The synagogue service is part of that.

And – apart from a small fanatical minority – the vast
majority of Jews never want to have anything ever again to do with relating to
God, to the divine, in that archaic fashion. And yet we still read these texts,
devotedly, and study them and delve into them and repeat them and teach them to
our youngsters - as if they contain hidden depths of meaning and significance.

So if you come in from the outside you might well think:
what a weird people this is, the Jewish people, the so-called ‘people of the
Book’, immersed in these ancient stories and texts and rituals, that seem to
bear no relationship to everyday life, to modern life.

Take just the three verses that begin chapter 20 of Leviticus,
with their repeated refrain “Don’t give up your offspring to Molech” -
Molech was one of the local Canaanite gods at the time these texts were
composed, when child sacrifice was still prevalent. “Don’t
give up your offspring to Molech” means ‘don’t
sacrifice your children’ - that’s
what the other tribes do, the other people in the region; but for you, the
Israelite community, it’s a crime condemned in the strongest possible terms. It
deserves a death penalty in its own right, the Torah says.

And we read it and think: child-sacrifice? That’s nothing to do with us. Deliberately
killing children, offering them to the gods - it’s barbaric. Yes, it might have
been done far off in the past, in so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, but what’s the
point of still repeating it now, in our sacred scriptures? Maybe it has
historical value to be reminded how far we have come as a culture, but - like
sacrificing goats and bullocks as a way of connecting with holiness - surely it’s part of a whole way of thinking
that has disappeared? Surely we don’t need to be reminded when we come to the
synagogue that we shouldn’t sacrifice our children to an idol, or an ideology.

Any yet.

Here are three examples of child sacrifice that are still
being practiced. (And I could offer a dozen more). They are taken from one
newspaper on a single day from the first week in April this year.

First example – far away, but brought into our homes through
the newspapers and television and carried around in our pockets on our screens:
rows of lifeless children, some still foaming at the mouth, in a hospital,
targeted, bombed, in Syria last month. They’d been taken there directly from
the chemical strike in Idlib province. That second wave of bombing, of the
hospital to which the victims had been taken, was a deliberate act of
child-sacrifice after the first toxic strike. Back in September in besieged
Aleppo the two largest hospitals were deliberately targeted : 96 children died
- sacrificed. “You cannot imagine what
we see every day: children who are coming to us as body parts. We collect the
body parts and wrap them in shrouds and bury them,” said one of the nurses at
one of the affected hospitals, who was there during the bombings.

Two and a half
thousand years ago the compilers of the Torah saw the crime and judged the
crime worthy of the severest punishment. “Do not sacrifice your own offspring”.
This text isn’t past – it’s not from a bygone age. It’s a text speaking to
today. And who knows for how long into our collective futures?

Second example, different kind. Not literal
child-sacrifice but symbolic sacrifice of our offspring. Nearer to home. On our
doorsteps. A joint investigation by Greenpeace and the Guardian newspaper last
month revealed that hundreds of thousands of children at schools and nurseries
across England and Wales are being exposed to illegal levels of air pollution
from diesel vehicles. Not just in London but in towns and cities across the UK.
Prolonged exposure to the nitrogen dioxide in traffic fumes reduces lung growth
in children and youngsters, produces long-term ill-health and can cause
premature death.

What does this mean? It
suggests that the cars we drive kill our children. This isn’t about accidents,
it’s about air pollution. Who is responsible for this? Are we responsible for
this? We don’t want to think that the cars we drive, the cars we choose to buy,
are resulting in child-sacrifice. Yet this seemingly archaic text, the Torah,
prompts these uncomfortable, inconvenient, in-your-face questions.

Final example. Another difficult one, overtly political this
time. The Torah isn’t interested in party politics but it is interested in
justice, and injustice, and questions of morality about how a society
functions. So, third example of child-sacrifice, symbolic sacrifice: the
benefits cuts that came into force last month in the UK will push a quarter of
a million more children into poverty. Remove tax credit and a child doesn’t get
breakfast. All the children’s charities in the UK will tell you the same thing:
the basics of keeping our children safe, healthy and developing are
increasingly under threat.

London already has the highest child poverty rate in the
country. It’s not only that the freeze in benefits rates and cuts to child tax
credits has these consequences but when
central government cuts the money local councils can put into child social care
there are significant knock-on effects in relation to child mental health
problems, nutrition and child exploitation.
“Do not sacrifice your children to Molech” – to a god, an idol, an ideology. It’s painful to know that children are the
hidden sacrifice of a system we’ve voted for: austerity.

But the sad reality is that if you worship at the shrine
of nationalism; or unfettered economic neoliberalism; or austerity, then the victims begin to pile up.

It is the task of religion - certainly of Judaism - to
speak truth to power. As the prophets of Israel knew, such truths are often
unwelcome. These ancient texts still have the power to disturb us, to disrupt
our complacency, to challenge us to question ourselves about the choices we
make.

Why else do we read them, year in year out, why else do
we pass on their wisdom to the next generation? Jews are – in spite of
everything we have suffered and experienced – almost perversely attached to
remaining eternal optimists. We believe that things can change, things can improve:
we stubbornly insist that if we listen in to the divine spirit which infuses
these texts of our tradition, listen in and act upon the values they espouse,
we can create the kind of society, the kind of world, we would like to live in.
And pass on to our children. This is the promise encoded in our scriptures. It’s
hard to believe sometimes, and I suppose it’s easy to ignore. But over the
generations we have learnt that we ignore it at our peril.

We still insist that – whatever our own doubts, and
whatever opposition we find both inside and outside the Jewish community – that
Jewish life depends on, is rooted in, a continual wrestling with the texts of
our tradition, however bizarre they might seem, and a continual attempt to live
out, be true to, the inner spiritual and
moral values they espouse.

[an abbreviated version of a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, May 6th, 2017]